"Correction: The original title of this article incorrectly suggested that Neil Ferguson stated his initial model was wrong. The article has been revised to make clear that he provided a downgraded projection given the new data and current mitigation steps."
If you can show me I'm wrong, please do.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...
I'm not sure you read your own link correctly.
"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said."
I have my doubts that the numbers would support this claim. And if so, then virtually everyone in Spain or Italy would already be a carrier.
The fact that cases were linked to known arrivals also is evidence against this hypothesis : if a high proportion of carriers were unwitting and asymptomatic you would expect many of those diagnosed to not have a link to someone previously diagnosed.
However, the test you need to run is an antibody test, since negative tests don't tell you whether you've already had it.
And this is a major revision. It drops estimated deaths in the UK from 500,000 to "20,000 or far fewer." It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.
The reason is that the transmissibility estimate has gone up, which implies that many more people have already had the virus than we realized. This, in turn, means that a much lower percentage are serious cases. It also means that we are much nearer to the peak than we thought.
Edited to add: He also credits the lockdown in the UK, but if you look at the previous model of how this plays out even with a complete lockdown, you see that the vast majority of the change must come from the change in estimate of transmissibility.
That'd be wonderful. But, doesn't that conflict with what we saw actually happen in Italy?
Italy has never run out of ICU beds. There have been sporadic and garbled reports of temporary shortages in Lombardy specifically, alleviated by patient transfers and ward conversions, and some of those reports were contradictory (e.g. doctors or mayors saying they were rationing care but other more senior healthcare leaders saying they weren't).
The UK had a hospital that hit capacity temporarily but it only lasted 12 hours before transfers reduced the pressure again.
We'll be seeing a lot of activity like that in the next weeks - reports that hospitals are full, then they stop being full as more capacity is added or patients are rebalanced onto other hospitals. The assumption of total ICU exhaustion seems to have been based on the assumption of uniform case growth everywhere which isn't happening, and perhaps also an inability to quickly add capacity.
The data out of NY that makes me most suspicious of this new model is actually the 72% negative rate on tests. I would expect that to be a lot lower. But that's just a gut feeling.
Edit: I think it is important to keep in mind that Italy's deaths per day are still going up. The growth has slowed and hopefully we are about to see the peak but it still hasn't come. Most western countries are on the same growth rate as Italy, there is no reason right now to think we won't see something similar happen all over the world.
Hopefully fewer visited the UK and even fewer had close contact with the locals.
citation please.
My understanding is that it's because of the policy intervention that his team advised.
"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5."
[0]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...
[...] coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. — more than 1/2 of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case [because] they were so old and sick [...]
So basically "Scientist revises model based on new conditions". Isn't that supposed to happen?
A successful prevention is going to feel like failure. It's going to prompt questions like "was this worth all the panic, and tanking the economy?" Bodies are easy to count, deaths prevented are invisible.
1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...
In other words, if this new R0 estimate is correct we were completely mislead about how big a deal this virus is, and comparisons to it "just" being like a bad flu year are more or less correct.
We've never had to build temporary hospitals to house 4,000 patients before, even in bad flu years. It's more infectious than flu and it hospitalises more people than flu. People keep talking about the death rate: there are other important things. How many people does it hospitalise? What happens to the people who can't get hospital treatment if the hospitals are full?
From places like Spain and Italy we know it puts a lot of people in hospital, and we know when that happens it starts shifting the mortality from the old people who were going to die anyway to younger people.
It's not like flu.
https://twitter.com/iamyourgasman/status/1241267189048578048
"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said."
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...
https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928
By adjusting those two parameters (R0 and IFR) in opposite directions, you can come up with a whole gamut of scenarios that match the evidence pretty well.
I'm just disgusted that the authors are now saying it was just an abstract demonstration of different scenarios, and pretending they didn't actually make the claims about the real world that they did.
Has it even been peer reviewed yet?
Un-fucking-believable.
I think it would be helpful if I cleared up some confusion that has emerged in recent days. Some have interpreted my evidence to a UK parliamentary committee as indicating we have substantially revised our assessments of the potential mortality impact of COVID-19
This is not the case. Indeed, if anything, our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought. Our lethality estimates remain unchanged.
My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place.
Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).
all shapiro's blog does is move the lede to the beginning and add contexr
